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> > I eschew all the other stuff heaped in there from the SGML days > > where possible. > >Such as? > macroprocessing - as you yourself highleghted. > I'd really love to know about the best alternatives >to DTDs. Many thanks. > I think we differ over the semantics of the word "eschew". Not really. I just thought that you may know about some SGML alternatives to DTD, because you know more about SGML than I do, so I asked ... just in case. For example, I don't understand what in DTDs is 'from SGML days' and what is not. I thought that everything in DTDs is 'from SGML days'. > > DTDs are not perfect, there are multiple alternatives, some better than > > others for document-oriented XML applications. > >Well, I don't understand your point then. > Likewise, I do not understand yours. Sorry. My point is simple. DTDs should die. Their syntax is ugly and inconvenient for processing, their functionality is not enough for the real-life cases. They are almost useless. Some time ago I've written a program, which took a DTD and generated the YACC grammar from it. Just reading the DTD into the memory was a challenge, because there was no reasonable API to work with DTDs. So it starts from the simple question: "Why do DTDs use non-XML-ish syntax" ? The next question could be : "OK, the syntax should be changed... but if changing the syntax - why not replace macroprocessing with something better?" Rgds.Paul.
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